I consider myself very fortunate, I’m a Collaboration TSP for the national Health and Life Sciences team at Microsoft. Yesterday I met with a group of professionals from a large healthcare provider in the Southwest where we discussed improving the patient experience of care (an IMI triple aim) by empowering care teams and employees.

Healthcare at home makes it easier for patients to get the care they need in the comfort of their home without the hassle of trying to schedule transportation to/from a facility. This includes support from a team of skilled nurses, physical therapists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, social workers, health aides, and nutritionists.

This dedicated team of professionals have unique processes, tools, and artifacts outside of the EMR to support their role and responsibility within the care team. Everyone I talked to, expressed a strong desire to serve their patients with compassion, dignity and honor. In the end, we all agreed that removing technology, or at the very least, removing the barrier to interacting with technology would go a long way toward empowering the care team and improving the patient care experience. Here’s how we did it…

Scenario

The Healthcare at Home team:

are highly mobile, geographically dispersed, and sometimes work in a disconnected state

require a high-level of interaction amongst team members and near real-time visibility into changes in the patient’s health status and adjustments to care regimens

Solution

In an hour we mocked up a solution using their organization’s investment in Microsoft 365, here’s what it looked like…

Microsoft Teams

Using Microsoft Teams we created a Contoso Home Healthcare Team Channel and subchannels to support the processes, tools, and artifacts specific to the Health at home care team structure.

The following setup illustrates how the Health at home team wanted to setup their Team for communication, collaboration, and increased productivity:

Conversations is used for ongoing persistent-chat conversations so that new team members can come up-to-speed quickly on historical team interactions.Microsoft Teams Conversations

Files is a SharePoint document library used for storing general team artifacts like Standard Operating Procedures, consent and approval forms, and operational guidelines.Microsoft Teams Files

About is a SharePoint Wiki that defines the Healthcare at home team, usage guidelines, and responsibilities for team participantsMicrosoft Teams About

H@H Team Schedule uses the team’s shared calendar from Outlook to display important dates and meetings.H@H Team Schedule

H@H Team Shifts uses StaffHub (soon to be Shifts), allowing team managers and members to create shifts, record time, pick up open shifts, swap shifts, and request time off. H@H Team Shifts

Training and Education uses a Stream channel to surface educational videos and Computer Based Training (CBT)Training and Education

Collectively we all agreed that we could enhance the experience through automating repetitive tasks and gaining insights into what’s working and what’s not working. I’ll be following up with the team to understand their use cases in greater detail, but it sounds like an opportunity to drive additional value from their M365 investment using Forms, Flow, PowerApps, and PowerBI.

Anyway you look at it, I’m fortunate to be working with people like me who want to change the way we experience wellness. THIS IS FUN!